Thu 14 Apr 2016
Reviewed by Barry Gardner: STEPHEN GREENLEAF – Blood Type.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[9] Comments
STEPHEN GREENLEAF – Blood Type. John Marshall Tanner #8. Morrow, hardcover, 1992. Bantam Crimeline, paperback, 1993.
It’s no news that I consider Stephen Greenleaf one of the better of the current PI writers. As I’ve remarked elsewhere about Jeremiah Healy, I know Greenleaf is going to give me at worst a decently written book of a type I enjoy, featuring a character I like.
One of Tanner’s`drinking friends, who works as a member of the emergency medical services, is found dead in an alley, apparently a suicide by drug overdose. He has recently been pouring out his heart to Tanner about the impending break-up of his marriage, about to be caused by the pursuit of his torch singer wife by a local tycoon. Tanner does not believe his friend would have killed himself (sound familiar?), and begins to investigate. The case of course proves complex, with links to a possible blood supply scandal and the victim’s troubled past.
As always, Greenleaf has things to say about society, and people, and the way we live our lives. Usually, they are not intrusive; here, at times I felt I could see the soapbox. I didn’t feel that the plot was well integrated, either — or perhaps it just didn’t grab me enough to make me pay attention.
All told, this was the least impressive entry in the series in some time. Still, it was a John Marshall Tanner book by Stephen Greenleaf, and if you’re a fan of same, that’s enough.
April 14th, 2016 at 2:58 pm
Barry sums up my feelings about Greenleaf and Tanner, I was a fan and that was enough. This one is not one of the better efforts and yet I recall enjoying it largely for the intrusive soapbox.
I’ve said before when I radically trimmed down the number of PI series I was following, among the writers I never considered moving off the list were Jeremiah Healey and Greenleaf, even when I cut Robert Parker and Spenser.
April 14th, 2016 at 3:26 pm
The soapbox was beginning to become too intrusive for me. There were six more Tanner books after this one, but while I didn’t make a conscious decision to put reading them off till later, that’s what I did, and as far as I can recall, later hasn’t happened yet. All the books I intended to read, and still haven’t. It’s quite a stack.
April 16th, 2016 at 1:17 pm
I’ve never read a Stephen Greenleaf novel. A personal reading prejudice. I’m sure have he’s a fine writer since those I know of good taste in such matters think he’s a good writer and that’s good enough for me.
The reason I never read him was that he seemed to be a Ross Macdonald knockoff. I have read Macdonald and I recall The Underground Man as one of the best PI novels I’ve ever read… this despite the fact that it’s burdened by such a pretentious, overripe, bookish style (you can’t read two paragraphs without stubbing your toe on a metaphor or tortured simile) and that the basic themes and setup were identical to every other Lew Archer novel I’d ever read (when bottom list writers do this we call ’em hacks).
But those in the academy (like Greenleaf)adored the guy, as did the NYT literati and so for 2-3 decades we had to endure the canard that the Holy Trinity of PI fiction was Hammett/Chandler/Macdonald. As if Mickey Spillane never existed!
Macdonald clones like Dennis Lynds and others actually spent more time than I’m spending here deriding the Mick. Ross Macdonald? Yeah, he wrote a few good books but today he’s more forgotten than John D. or S.S. Van Dine.
I love PI fiction (sorry, never read Lynds for the same reason I never read Greenleaf) and here’s to anyone who sits down and writes a private eye tale. But every one of them, male or female, draws on Dash, Ray, and the Mick or all three for the foundation upon which they build.
If I were to add to those three, it would be Robert B. Parker, who brought the PI into the 21st Century and the world in which many of us live our day to day lives.
April 16th, 2016 at 2:49 pm
Greenleaf is clearly in the Macdonald school and suffers all the problems you identify Stephen, and many of which I agree with. Chandler, correctly I think, pointed out a weakness in Macdonald in that he sounds like an academic writing a PI novel with, as you say, sometimes tortured metaphor and simile, and a return to the same basic theme again and again.
I enjoy them and Greenleaf more, but I can’t disagree with that attack on the Macdonald school. It is less authentic voice than the grittier more ‘authentic’ PI novel.
I disagree with Lynds on Spillane, strongly, but still can’t give up on his Dan Fortune, but I was a Lynds reader before I read his attacks on Spillane, a benefit to reading in the genre before I read about the genre and discovered who hated whom.
I read Greenleaf and Macdonald for the writing largely and the humanity, but not as authentic voices. Macdonald wrote some books I still think are among the best the genre produced, but I agree he has been eclipsed (and largely because Lew Archer isn’t really a character, but a cypher). I even agree about the pantheon, and that Parker would be the fourth man, not Macdonald.
The Macdonald school produced some writers whose work I still enjoy and recall with pleasure, but it is an academic and even intellectual take on the PI.
In a sense it is the same problem I have with Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove books and Western novels, because his revisionist version of the Old West is quite attractive to read, and absolute BS, actually farther removed from reality than Zane Gray or Max Brand. They are academic genre fiction, which is how I view Macdonald and his school.
April 16th, 2016 at 4:44 pm
If it is time that tells the story, Hammett, Chandler and Spillane are all originals in their own way who are still remembered.
Both Ross Macdonald and John D. have faded badly, but not completely. For all of their writing abilities, I’d say that Greenleaf and Lynds are completely forgotten.
Question: Are Parker’s books still read and enjoyed? If so, how long will they continue to stand up? I suppose it may help that other writers are taking over his characters. Or does it?
April 16th, 2016 at 5:23 pm
Parker still has name recognition and gets treated with bestseller status, but I don’t see the original Spenser novels much. The last book of his I saw was one of the Westerns he apparently completed before his death.
What will ultimately determine who gets remembered will likely be what gets revived. Chandler and Hammett never did fall out of favor with readers and Max Allan Collins has kept Spillane out there though there was a brief period when his work was as rare as either Macdonald or MacDonald in bookstores.
Keep in mind too, it only takes one good movie or series for just about any writer to get revived and remembered, and ebooks and small revival houses and imprints have changed the game a lot. I recall it being almost impossible to find Carroll John Daly for ages and now I can download some novels for free. Many of the writers mentioned above still have a presence electronically that they might not have had otherwise. Currently you can find Stephen Marlowe, Dan Marlowe, and Donald Hamilton quite easily as well as some Frank Kane and Brett Halliday so the idea of who is ‘in print’ and not has changed radically. Writers I once had to search for like David Dodge or Richard Powell are only a click away on my Kindle. In fact Otto Penzler and Mysterious Press are keeping numerous writers available.
April 16th, 2016 at 9:46 pm
The ebook is the paperback of Today.
April 16th, 2016 at 10:58 pm
That may also be the answer to a question raised in a discussion following a different post; namely, what’s today’s equivalent of the dime novel / pulp magazine / paperback original progression that writers used to use to learn their craft?
A revolution is going on at this very moment, in other words, but I’m afraid it’s going on without me.
April 17th, 2016 at 3:01 pm
Self publishing makes ebooks a mixed bag, though there are many good writers producing fine material available primarily in ebook format, some who drop by here once in a while.
In the spirit of transparency I’m working on a largely ebook series — though we now have a publisher for trade editions and we have been around since 1995 — so I do have a horse in the race.
The problem is that there are many people publishing in desperate need of an editor to guide them and nurture their work. Many do have readers who copyread and pre read their work, but it isn’t something fan readers can really do, and listening to someone who reads a book for free and someone who pays you are two different things.
Ebooks are the new paperbacks, but because it is so cheap and easy there are literally thousands of books out there with attractive looking covers that sound good and then you pay $4 (many more professional types won’t charge that much for books not novel length) and find the writers work is absolute dreck and his ‘novel’ or omnibus of ‘novels’, consists of badly written derivative porn and he thinks under thirty thousand words equals novel length. Some of these writers don’t even understand the concept of word count defining what is a novel and not.
There is a lot of great pulp and paperback reprint material available that I applaud, and there is actually a good deal of new pulp material that is excellent — again, in the interest of transparency I have a small presence there — by people like Will Murray, Win Scott Eckert, James Reasoner and others. Where you run into more questionable material is in the less pulp style material.
But what is sorely missing from the field is editorial control over content. Professional writers would benefit too, but we do have some experience editing our own work and often friends who are also professionals we trust to vet our material. Writers without that support often don’t know to listen to others and have no support system among professional writers — often who have editorial experience. They don’t understand the difference between fans on Amazon praising your work and editors and actual reviewers and critics giving you decent feedback.
One of the things that makes this blog so valuable is that many of the people writing reviews, maybe even most of us, are not only longtime genre fans, we have expertise in the field of our own, some qualify as genre historians, some have written fiction professionally, some have been paid critics and reviewers. It gives this blog, and some others by people who post here at times, a weight others blogs don’t have. It is also a good place to learn and grow, Jonathan started out good, but he has really matured as a writer in his reviews on here for instance.
Yes the ebook revolution is as real as the paperback revolution, but by its nature a lot messier and much more difficult for readers to navigate. Luckily Kindle offers sample chapters of most books, but even there you can still get burned because we all have read writers who had one or two good chapters in them but were not novelists.